Neterpenie was written for the series Plamennye revoliutsionery (‘Ardent Revolutionaries’), and Trifonov worked on the novel at the same time as he was publishing his Moscow stories of 1969–71. The actual writing of the novel took place in 1972, and it was eventually published in 1973. It is from the outset no run-of-the-mill Soviet historical novel. Just as he is thorough in cataloguing the unremitting pressures of urban byt in modern Moscow, so his eye for historical detail and accuracy is likewise impressive.

A journalist who visited Trifonov in 1976 noted the historical books on the writer's bookshelves: all fifty-seven volumes of Byloe (‘The Past’), the journals Katorga i ssylka (‘Hard Labour and Exile’), Golos minuvshego (‘The Voice of the Past’), Krasnyi arkhiv (‘Red Archive’), editions of Obshchestvo politicheskikh katorzhan i ssyl'noposelentsev (‘The Society of Political Hard Labour Prisoners and Exiles’), memoirs of ‘People's Will’ activists Anna Pribyleva-Korba, Vera Figner, Nikolai Morozov, Mikhail Frolenko, Osip Aptekman, Ivan Popov, German Lopatin, and the bibliographical dictionary Deiateli revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii (‘Figures in the Revolutionary Movement in Russia’). He also possessed the 1919 book Moskovskaia okhrana i ee sekretnye sotrudniki (‘The Moscow Secret Police and its Secret Personnel’), which must have come in useful for Troitskii's researches in Drugaia zhizn', Aleksandr Egorov's Razgrom Denikina and the memoirs of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko from 1924, both of which are relevant for Starik.